Kalio

Marketo lets us connect the dots and bring everything together into a unified picture. All of our programs. All of our channels. It gives us the visibility we need to work more intelligently and move faster than with any other solution out there.

Alex Lin
Director of Marketing
Kalio

Highlights

Increase number of campaigns 700%

Net-new unique web visitors up 600%

Time to create new campaigns cut down 1/3

Challenges

Creating campaigns was a painful process for Kalio marketers, and measuring and demonstrating the impact of campaigns was virtually impossible.

Alex Lin was wrestling with a marketing automation system that did little in the way of automating. His team would spend days crafting an email campaign, and then weeks trying to consolidate click-through, open rates and other data across the marketing automation and CRM systems to gauge campaign success. But they couldn’t even answer basic questions like how many net-new qualified leads were generated and how much each lead cost. Marketo has changed all that. Now when Alex presents marketing’s successes to the board, he has more than eye-catching graphics and dazzling colors—he has hard evidence that objectively demonstrates that marketing is indeed driving revenue.

Objectives

Simplify and automate campaign creation

Integrate data across all departments, channels, and mediums

Optimize programs by gaining insight into which ones are successful

Solution

From working hard…

Kalio is passionate about delivering eCommerce solutions that empower online retailers to transform ideas into revenue faster. Today, Kalio’s clients drive almost a billion dollars of online sales. Just a few years ago, the company started on a mission to go-to-market with a completely new on-demand enterprise platform for the mid-market, and each year the marketing team was under pressure to drive growth even higher.

To meet the company’s aggressive growth targets, the team implemented a marketing automation system that came highly recommended. Unfortunately, that system failed to deliver on the automation promise. Creating and executing campaigns was an uphill battle that required days of manual effort. And there was no way to accurately measure campaign effectiveness due to a lack of real integration with the CRM system—even though both solutions were from the same provider.

“It was disheartening to see how hard the team was working and how frustrated everyone was,” Alex recalls. “We needed tools that would empower us to win, to succeed. Tools that would give us visibility into the pipeline and let us see if we were having an impact.”

…To working smart

The path forward was to replace the current marketing automation system with one that delivers true automation, integration across channels, and a simple, straightforward interface that makes creating programs not just easy, but repeatable. Kalio replaced the old system with Marketo, the leader in digital marketing software and solutions. The Kalio marketing team is still working hard, but now they’re also working smart.

“Now we can see things clearly,” Alex says. “We can define the levels of the funnel the way we want to look at them. We can capture leads from online campaigns as well as offline events and track them all the way through to conversion. We can see how many net-new leads are coming in and slice and dice the data to understand the factors and actions that influence conversion.”

Benefits

Campaigns in one-third of the time

Marketo’s interface has simplified and streamlined every aspect of creating and managing campaigns. Previously, it took at least three days of manual effort to put together a simple email campaign. The Marketo campaign cloning capability lets the Kalio marketers recreate an entire campaign in one click. Now, they produce complex campaigns in one-third of the time, including all aspects of the campaign—from message content, to forms, landing pages, and workflows.

“Some systems let you copy pieces of a campaign to speed the creation of a new one,” Alex explains. “But cloning does much more. We can carry forward everything that has made a particular program successful, including segmentation, personalization, tokens, and dynamic content. The end result is not only more campaigns, but more effective campaigns. That translates into more revenue.”

Kalio marketers now have time to focus attention on personalized and targeted nurture campaigns that are proving to be “fantastically successful.” These campaigns have driven up net-new unique web visitors by 600%. Plus, Marketo A/B testing automatically helps the team determine which version of an email message drives the most conversions. And conversion rates are up across the board to twice as many conversions some cases.

Flying instead of running

The combination of simplicity, automation, and efficient workflow enabled the team to roll out seven times more marketing campaigns than with the previous solution. With Marketo’s drag-and-drop interface and ability to see everything in one place, the team can quickly create, report on, and optimize campaigns.

“If you ask me what management expects of marketing,” Alex concludes, “I’d have to say revenue, revenue, and more revenue. Our executives want campaigns that work, and they want them now. Trying to get the job done with the previous solution was like trying to run to Europe. Maybe we’d figure out a way to get there eventually. But when management says you need to be in Europe tomorrow, you’ve got to jump on a plane. Marketo gives us what we need to create great campaigns in record time. It makes our job enjoyable and it makes our successes provable.”